Sunday, November 20, 2011

Solaris 11

Oracle finally lauched Solaris 11 (aka SunOS 5.11 update 11/11).While retaining all major features of Solaris 10 (zones, ZFS, ...) this shifted towards the now defunct OpenSolaris (IPS packaging, elimination of some ancient tools, more GNU-like utilities).I have installed it and worked OOB flawlessly, install time being of about 10 minutes. The installer seemed a little outdated but worked precisely - similar to a Linux/BSD one. After the fist boot I enjoyed tinkering a little with it. The feeling was that I have been working more with a Debian-like distro than with Solaris as many of the Linux idioms were incorporated.On this promise Oracle (they promised to invest more on Solaris than Sun did) kept its word and shipped quite a good system. Too bad that they have closed the ARM branch as Solaris has shown enormous potential for embedded devices.